The internet marketing team at iClick Solutions spend countless hours reading internet marketing news, updates and using all this knowledge to create innovative ideas for our clients.
Each week we are going to highlight the best internet marketing news that we have seen you will not want to miss. Makes sure to subscribe to iClick Solutions RSS, via email on the right sidebar and / or connect with us on Facebook so you don’t miss out on these weekly updates and learn how to leverage internet marketing and social media to connect with your customer online.
For the week of Monday, May 3, 2010 here are iClick Solutions Best Internet Marketing winners that you want to make sure you read:
1. Which is Better for Online Marketing? Facebook or Twitter? – Well, according to SearchEngineJournal.com, it’s Facebook. Some other experts disagree. According to a Chadwick Martin Bailey, Twitter was more hip back in 2008, when it was smaller. In fact, a chart shows that the microblogging network actually stagnated in the second half of 2009. Comparing keyphrases like “Twitter marketing” and “Facebook marketing,” it’s plain to see that there is much more interest in the latter than the former, despite the fact that most corporate discourse with regards to online marketing is focused on Twitter, and not Facebook.
2. Google Search Gets a Major Overhaul – After months of testing and speculation, Google is finally releasing the next edition of Google search to the public, complete with a left-hand menu bar and even an update to the well-known Google logo.
3. Facebook Chat Down for Maintenance Following Privacy Lapse – The feature was presumably disabled following a report that exposed a Facebook security bug that allowed users to access and view friends’ live chats, friend requests and friends in common.
4. McDonald’s to Use Facebook’s Upcoming Location Feature – Facebook is preparing to launch location-based status updates for its users. But the social network is also planning to offer it to marketers, including McDonald’s.
5. When to Respond to Negative Buzz – Denise Zimmerman, President and Chief Strategy Officer of NetPlus Marketing Inc. is a 25-year marketing veteran. Denise Zimmerman has spent the past 18 years focusing on the digital landscape and best-practice applications in marketing, advertising and communications. She spoke with eMarketer Senior Analyst Jeffrey Grau about the options retailers have in responding to negative buzz on social media sites.
6. Apple Has Sold 1 Million iPads – Apple has officially confirmed it has sold 1 million iPads. The company sold its one millionth iPad on Friday, April 30, just 28 days after the device’s release.
7. Website Speed Now A Ranking Factor- Last year, Google had mentioned that eventually site speed would become a factor in how they rank sites in their algorithm. Well the time is here because Google officially announced it. However be smart, don’t sacrifice relevance and quality for speed because even Google says it will have little impact.
If you have any thoughts regarding above articles please share below. Also, if you have a suggestion for next week’s best internet marketing tips please Contact Us.
Social Media Revolution video by Erik Qualman we all know and love has just been updated with new social media statistics and graphics. If you have not seen the original social media revolution video you can see it on YouTube.
It is amazing how fast the world of social media moves! All the sources and the text list of stats can be found on the Socialnomics blog here. These social media statistics are very eye opening so give it a watch below and let us know what you think:
Here are the top 5 social media statistics we found most interesting:
Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
78% of consumers trust peer recommendations and only 14% trust advertisements
60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
Let us know your thoughts below. What social media statistics do you find most surprising or unbelievable? If you do not have a social media strategy in place for your business and are convinced after watching this video you need to get one in place but don’t know where to start please either visit our social media media service page or contact us today.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for monitoring your websites traffic, from referral’s to search engine activity.
Hopefully you have heard how powerful Google Analytics is and of course, you can’t beat the price of free. For those that are not as familiar with Google Analytics let me give you a brief overview and how Google Analytics can benefit you.
Google Analytics tells you how visitors found your website and how they interact with it. You’ll be able to compare the behavior and profitability of visitors who were referred from each of your advertisements, keywords, search engines, and emails, and gain valuable insight into how to improve your site’s content and design.
However large or small your site, and however you drive traffic to it – whether it’s unpaid search, partner sites, AdWords, or other cost-per-click programs – Google Analytics tracks it, from click to conversion.
For those that are leveraging Google AdWords (Google’s Pay Per Click PPC program), Google Analytics will provide you with the actionable information that you can use to increase your ROI by tracking cost data for all of your campaigns and combining that data with conversion information on a page-by-page basis.
Google Analytics automatically imports Google AdWords cost data so that you can track the effectiveness of your AdWords campaigns, and automatically tags your AdWords destination URLs to track keyword and campaign conversion rates with no effort on your part! To find out more about AdWords, please visit the AdWords home page.
Recently a client asked for help on how to install Google Analytics on their website and because Google Analytics can be intimidating at first we wanted to provide Google Analytics setup instructions for others to learn from.
This blog post is designed to ease you into the Google Analytics application and teach you how to use Google Analytics. We will provide advanced Google Analytics tips in future blog posts so make sure you subscribe to iClick Solutions RSS, join us on Facebook or Twitter.
Install Google Analytics With Google Analytics Setup Guide at iClick Solutions and learn about important website metrics and get insight into website visitors below:
Step 1 – Set up Google Analytics
Go to Google Analytics and click “Sign Up Now” under the “Features” thumbnail.
Enter the Google account name (e-mail address) and password and click “Sign Up” again.
In the next window, provide Google with the URL website address of the website you wish to analyze with Google Analytics.
Give the website an account name that is easy to remember. If you will be tracking multiple sites, this is especially important.
Select the country your site is based in, or the country it is serving. Then select the appropriate time zone. Tip – If your site is based in Australia but all your users are in the United States you may want to select a U.S. time zone to figure out when in their day most choose to visit your website.
Click Continue.
In the next window, provide your contact information.
Click Continue.
In the next window, read the Google Analytics terms of service. If you agree with them, click the Yes box.
Click Create New Account.
Google will provide you with Google Analytics (GA) Javascript code. This code is mostly the same for every website except for 1 critical difference – your account number that looks like UA-XXXXXXXX-1. Copy this – you’ll need to insert it into your web site just above the closing /body tag.
Step 2: Insert Google Analytics JavaScript Into Your Pages
You must insert the code into every page you want tracked. If you have a technical person who takes care of your pages, have them add the code for you. Contact iClick Solutions if you need help with this step. Many websites that are on a content management system or eC0mmerce platform will have a module or single file you can edit that places the Google Analytics code on every page of your website.
Step 3: Analyze the Data
This is where it starts to get fun and somewhat addicting for those analytical types. For example, if you want to find out whether your site has peaks during certain times of day or on certain days of the week, Google Analytics can tell you by following the steps below:
In the menu to the left, click on the word Visitors.
To the left beneath the main chart, you’ll see a number of different statistical breakouts.
Click on any of the words to get a bar-chart breakout of the daily performance for that aspect of site traffic measurement.
If you want to learn hour-by-hour trends, click on the word Hourly above the bar chart to see an hour by hour graph for the time period at hand.
To compare two different time periods, click on the dates above the line graph. Select the first set of dates you want to work with, check the Compare to Past box, click on the second set of dates, and click the Apply Range button.
Here is a great video that walks you through some of the features inside Google Analytics:
After setting the tracking wait a few days so Google Analytics can start tracking some data as Google Analytics is not real time. We recommend you only check the statistics once a week and then analyze your traffic, top traffic pages, what keywords bring your traffic, what kind of visitors you get, and so on.
Here are a few other Google Analytics tips:
The process requires a Google account. If you don’t already have one, just sign up for a free account.
Once your account has been set up, you can add more than one Web site to your tracking options by adding the source code to all the Web pages that you want tracked.
The account name that you fill in during the Google Analytics setup process will be the name that appears in the Google Analytics reports.
You should consider excluding internal traffic by going to: Analytics Settings => Edit => “+Add Filter”: and put in your internal IP address.
Capture internal search stats if your website has a search tool on it. With this feature you can you see what a visitor put into your internal search box, what page they were on when they made the search and what page they chose in the search results. Any internal search will work as long as it passes the search variable through the URL.
On the account information page, the only required field is the Country/ Territory information; you needn’t divulge any other personal information.
I hope you found this Install Google Analytics post helpful, and if you have any questions, leave your comments below or contact us if you don’t want to ask your questions in public.
The internet marketing team at iClick Solutions spend countless hours reading internet marketing news, updates and using all this knowledge to create innovative ideas for our clients.
Each week we are going to highlight the best internet marketing news that we have seen you will not want to miss. Makes sure to subscribe to iClick Solutions RSS, via email on the right sidebar and / or connect with us on Facebook so you don’t miss out on these weekly updates and learn how to leverage internet marketing and social media to connect with your customer online.
For the week of Monday, April 26th here are iClick Solutions Best Internet Marketing winners that you should read:
Don’t Penalize Yourself: Mobile Sites Are Not Duplicate Contentby Bryson Meunier – Knowing that search engines index and return mobile content for relevant queries, and that they have blended mobile ranking algorithms to rank mobile content for mobile queries and desktop content for desktop queries, it’s clear to me that they don’t treat mobile sites like traditional desktop duplicate content. Knowing this, it’s a wonder that many mobile SEO experts, including some whose opinions I generally respect, would continue to recommend blocking your mobile site from Googlebot and other web crawlers.
Growing Your Social Network: Quantity vs Quality by Tonya R. Taylor – When growing your social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) community numbers, is it about the quantity or the quality? This conversation was started by John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing who sent this tweet: “wondering if as your social networks grow they become less social – engagement doesn’t scale online much better than in person.”
How To Know If Your Business Is Social by Jason Falls – Before you get lost in your next gadget-assisted attempt at connecting with someone, remember that the Internet and technology allows you to do things. It doesn’t allow you to be anything. It’s a mechanism. You are the platform.
Want Reviews? Give Customers an Incentive by Matt McGee – Internet Retailer has an interesting article that offers a case study of sorts about how online retailer evogear.com convinced customers to write more reviews. While the article talks about product reviews, I think there are still some truths in it for small businesses who want more company/business reviews.
Web Analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets by Avinash Kaushik – It is surprising how often these “simple” things come up. “What is the difference between a metric and a key performance indicator (KPI)?” “What is a dimension in analytics?” “What is segmentation?” “Are goals metrics?” And many more. There seems to be genuine confusion about the simplest, most foundational, parts of web metrics / analytics. So in this short post let’s try and see if we can fix this really basic problem.
If you have any thoughts regarding above articles please share below. Also, if you have a suggestion for next week’s best internet marketing tips please Contact Us.
Of course you can eat cookies without milk but is it really as fun or enjoyable without them together? That is the main concept behind foursquare – connecting people with locations.
Foursquare is a social geo-location tool that you use on your phone (Blackberry, Android and iPhone) which gives you and your friends new ways of exploring your city or where you are traveling to. Earn points and unlock badges for discovering new things.
A common question we hear when we tell restaurant business owners about Foursquare is “why are people using this tool to tell people where they are eating lunch?”
Well let me give you 3 reasons why foursquare is getting so huge:
Foursquare is extremely helpful when looking for something such as nearby coffee, restaurant, etc. Just launch the application and foursquare will show you all the local businesses around you. You can see tips and even specials nearby.
Becoming the “mayor” of each place that one visits is very addicting. Even California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is on Foursquare. Hey Foursquare are you going to up the prize and start offering Governor status?
We all like to (if we are honest) showing what we accomplished. By checking into locations you start earning badges. The gaming aspect around foursquare makes trying out new places really fun. I am amazed at how many of my friends on Foursquare make decisions on where to go to hopefully earn badges. There are a ton of different badges you can earn. Here is a good site that lists many Foursquare Badges that look like below:
Now that foursquare just hit 1,000,000 users it is time you learn what foursquare is and how you can leverage it in your restaurant marketing plan. Start by watching this video to better understand what foursquare is before we get into the details on how you can use foursquare to market your local business:
Any business, especially restaurants, with a physical location immediately needs to pay attention to how Foursquare can help you connect with current and future customers. There are three primary benefits to Foursquare for your business:
Brand Awareness
Customer and market analysis
Customer Retention through loyalty and rewards
Brand Awareness:
Offer promotions, contests and giveaways - One of the most effective ways to create a buzz around your brand is by offering free or discounted products or services through promotions, contests and giveaways.
With Foursquare, implementing these marketing tactics becomes easy. Whether it’s offering a discount to anyone who checks in to your location on a particular day or awarding the first person to check in a free product or service, Foursquare allows companies to attract and reward new and existing customers. Make sure someone on your team is monitoring this closely so you can act quickly when customers check in.
As shown below don’t forget to increase awareness through other local search options such as Google Maps and show your customers that your business rewards Foursquare users:
Don’t forget to show extra love to your venue’s Mayor!
Customer and market analysis:
Marketing intelligence - Foursquare recently announced a free analytics tool and dashboard that gives businesses access to valuable customer data on those customers that visit your business location.
Once you are in your Foursquare business dashboard you can review the following and adjust your strategies accordingly:
most recent visitors
most frequent visitors
the time of day people check in
total number of unique visitors
histogram of check-ins per day
gender breakdown of customers
portion of foursquare check-ins broadcast to Twitter and Facebook
To sign up visit your foursquare venue page and click on “are you the manager of this business” (see below) to get started. If you are not sure what your foursquare venue page is or if you even have one check out the Foursquare search tool.
Customer Retention through loyalty and rewards:
Create incentives for new customers - For restaurant or retail businesses offering incentives using Foursquare can help to attract new customers to try you out. By offering a discount or special to those who ‘check in’ to your company location, businesses can raise awareness, increase customer traffic and capture new business leads.
Reward Repeat Customer Visits -Make sure you take good care of repeat customers and foursquare is the tool that makes this very easy. Here are 2 ways you can reward repeat customers:
Check-In Specials: unlocked when a user checks in to your venue a certain number of times. For example, Foursquare says you’ve been here 10 times? That’s a free drink for you!
Frequency Based Specials: unlocked every X check-ins. For example, Foursquare users get 20% off any entree every 5th check-in!
The ultimate award is becoming a mayor of a location. Businesses can easily take advantage of the obsession with Foursquare with customers becoming the ‘Mayor’ of your location.
I would recommend you consider asking your employees to not be overly aggressive with becoming a mayor of your business. Speaking from experience it is frustrating being in competition with someone that is at your business everyday and they oust me as a mayor. If you are rolling your eyes now based on what I just wrote I have not done my job because you still see this is as silly game. It is definitely not and the team behind Foursquare are genius. Let’s try and guess which company (uh Facebook) is going to buy them out.
To get started with Foursquare for your business check out the Foursquare Business page. Here are a few tips to get the word out on your Foursquare venue:
Engage with Foursquare customers who check in at your business. Thank them for playing and let them feel noticed and appreciated.
Create materials that advertise your involvement with Foursquare such as window signs and posters for your business. Maybe have a sign that shows off who the mayor is and give them that celebrity status.
Advertise your Foursquare venue on your website, blog, Facebook and Twitter profiles.
Let us know what you think about Foursquare? Are you using Foursquare for your business today and what stories or experiences can you share? If you own a restaurant make sure to check out our Restaurant Marketing Arizona page to see how we can help you.
The internet marketing team at iClick Solutions spend countless hours reading internet marketing news, updates and using all this knowledge to create innovative ideas for our clients.
